Marvel: Spider-Man PS4 Is Just The Beginning, We’re Going for Truly Epic Games

For a long time, world renowned comic book publisher Marvel stood on the sidelines in the gaming industry. Its coveted intellectual properties saw little use in recent years, with the exception of Marvel Heroes and LEGO Marvel games, at a time when Marvel based comic book movies and TV shows are literally booming.

That’s all changing in the future, starting with Spider-Man PS4. Marvel chose Sony and Insomniac as the partners for a triple A game and according to Jay Ong, Vice President of Marvel Games, this is just the beginning. Here’s what he told Polygon at E3 2016:

Is [Spider-Man] a signal of things to come? Oh, yes. Absolutely. And we can’t wait to tell the world about it.

One of the things we really focus on in terms of our new strategy is that we all believe that great games drive the brand and great games are what our fans really deserve. The question is, ‘How we can get there?’ The thing we landed on is to be really selective with who we partner with. Extremely selective. Right now I would say that out of every 10 opportunities we look at, we maybe do one.”

What we look at first and foremost is the talent level of partner. Are they world class in building the games we’re talking about? They have to have world-class talent. They have to be able to invest the resources to make that talent sing. Equally important is, do they have passion for the IP they’re working on? Do they share the same ambition? Do they love the character? We look for passion, that comes through in the first 30 seconds.

One of our mantras is authenticity; it’s easy to make a game with Spider-Man on the label, but it’s much harder to make it truly authentic in a way that reflects Peter Parker, the character.

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The good news is that Marvel Games seems to have borrowed the incredibly high standard from Marvel Studios. Gone is the era of movie tie-ins; if a game misses a movie’s release date, it’s not going to be a problem as long as the delay makes for a better title.

We are absolutely obsessed about [quality], that is our North Star. We always say ‘Great is not good enough. We’re going for truly epic. In this modern day and age, that tie-in model doesn’t work anymore.

Things like [games] you cannot under-resource. You can’t not give the development time … to do justice to the game. We think, ‘How do we make the game better? How do we help our partners make the game better?

Building these franchises, and building these characters [at Marvel Games], this is that first big milestone from this team. This is a huge ambitious project.

Marvel Games also announced another big project last year: a partnership with Telltale Games to develop a series of games. The first one should be available in 2017.